When I talk to friends of my father who have read Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, they all say it had a profound effect on them back in the 1970s. Looking around, sometimes it seems the early tech of the 20th century was built primarily by people influenced by Pirsig’s writing. But it has been more than 40 years since the book was published—where are we now?

I recently watched a YouTube video of a technical manager from Criteo, Justin Coffey, demoing the in-house business intelligence tool his team had built. It’s a great presentation. Justin actually lists reasons why his team decided to build its own tool; all are good reasons, except none answer why they would have reinvented something when a better tool already exists. (see footnotes)
Since I work across vendors and indirectly benefit from the complexity of new data tools—open source included—I also frequently hear reasonable arguments against buying a new tool.

Recently I left my best job thus far, the job at Looker, to found a consulting company. Naturally there were a lot of factors at play, but Looker’s gravitational pull on me was due to the technology itself. Looker is one of those technologies that everyone wants to build on top of because: